


Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

by AndallitsGlory



Series: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do [1]
Category: Midnighter (Comics), Stormwatch (Comics)
Genre: Angie is not the Engineer yet, Apollo Swift and The Engineer are best friends, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Break Up, THE best friends, but like platonic Hurt/Comfort, how did I end up shipping Swift/The Engineer kind of, other perspective fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-06-03 09:17:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6605290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndallitsGlory/pseuds/AndallitsGlory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So, how did Apollo deal while Midnighter was off "finding himself"? A look into the other side of the the Midnighter Rebirth title with some wish fulfillment-involvement of other Authority characters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

**Author's Note:**

> This is looking to be a 4-part story--or rather, 4 scenes-ish from what Apollo may have been doing after Midnighter broke up with him through Angie Spica's point of view. This first chapter takes place soon after the fight seen in Midnighter #2 and #3. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it :) And heeey, when Midnighter wraps up next month, maybe I'll go back to reunion fics after!

Shards of light stabbed their way into the bedroom and pierced Angela Spica’s eyes. She grumbled and rolled over in bed to bury her face further into the musky pillow, still caught in the web of a dream-filled sleep. There, she stayed throughout the phone call, silent and vibrating against the nightstand that didn’t belong to her. 5 rings before it went still at the edge of the wooden surface, battery power threateningly low.

At the second call, it fell off the table and onto the floor. The clatter broke through the last protective layers of her mind and she bolted upright, clutching the sheets to her. 

“Oh shit,” she said, looking to the other side of the bed to find the last man she wanted to see, still snoozing away. “Oh fuck, you stupid bitch. Stupid, stupid…”

This she continued to ferociously whisper as she slipped out of bed and went on a journey to collect her things from the floor. Bra, jeans, blouse, one sock and…where was her thong? She whirled around, scanning the floor, dunked to check under the bed, and began to toss some of his things aside with her foot as she searched. That stupid, slinky, black little thing, if it wasn’t so hot she might’ve considered letting him have it as a souvenir. 

She checked her phone. 2 missed calls from Andrew. Then two texts:

**Call me :(  
Actually… can you just come over? Plz?**

Okay, fuck the thong. 

The mass under the bed started to shift as she found her other sock reposing in one of her shoes. “Angie?”

She cursed under her breath again, this time in Spanish, as she closed the last button of her blouse and jammed her bare feet into her sneakers. If not for Andrew’s texts, she might have felt wistful for years past, her fabulous 20s when her clothes came as sexy as her undies. A morning like this would’ve followed a night on the town, slamming down shots and dancing until her soles screamed. Now all she had was a hangover from that crummy sports bar’s gin, which her coworkers had dragged her to, and an ex-boyfriend piteously calling for her to come back to bed.

As she threw her socks into her purse, her hand brushed against a curled bundle of paper that covered her wallet. She paused for the first time since waking up, yesterday’s thrill returning with a smart spark. It had been personally given to her, a gift for her colleagues to never know of. 

“Angie…” Brent whined.

Angie snapped back into herself and ran out the door, slamming it behind her. She pressed her back up against it, like a horror movie victim finding respite from the hackneyed slasher, and breathed in the morning’s cool air. “Dio,” she said.

Her phone vibrated again. She texted a response.

Omw carino

***

Andrew had the kind of apartment that Angie usually only saw in the movies. His kitchen alone made her die with jealousy. Two stovetops, two ovens, and wide open toward the window so that one only had to turn around to get a fantastic view of Opal City below. Angie hated Andrew and his fortune. Angie loved Andrew and his fortune.

When she opened the door, the sweet smell of baking wafted toward her. A wire rack sitting atop of Andrew’s granite countertop presented at least three different kinds of muffins, including one with chocolate chips placed atop. After hugging Andrew, whose broad, godly shoulders hunched over the sink as he scrubbed dishes, she took one and bit into it.

“How is it?” Andrew asked.

“A little dry,” she admitted, turning the remainder around to inspect it. This was but one of his weekly recipe adventures. She had learned long ago that he wanted her to be as honest with her feedback as possible. “Is this supposed to be chocolate chip cookie?”

“It’s supposed to taste like a pancake,” he said. “But healthy.”

“That might be your problem there,” she said, but took another bite. She thought his voice sounded odd, but couldn’t quite tell. This, mixed in with the apartment’s feeling of absence that had greeted her at the door, didn’t sit well with her. She took on a softer tone when she asked, “What’s this all about?”

“Grieving,” he said.

“Well, don’t let me stop you,” she said, joking. But then he lifted a golden, soapy hand and swiped the back of it across his eyes. Her lips parted and she grabbed his wrist to try to tug it away from the muffin tin he cleaned. She could never actually dream of propelling his statuesque body anywhere, but Andrew was quite adept at picking up her signals. He allowed her to turn off the sink and guide him to the kitchen table. 

“He’s gone, Angie,” Andrew said, and the only thing that surprised her was her lack of surprise. Andrew had always complained about Lucas’s listlessness and the two’s relationship often seemed more like two stags crushing their antlers into each other rather than a mature dynamic as of late. “It was his idea, but I packed his things.”

She at first meant to ask him if he knew where Lucas went, but then thought better of it. He probably went back to that awful woman who called herself The Gardener. According to Andrew, Lucas had a computerized brain that strategically advantaged him in any fight, but apparently that computer couldn’t help him find his way around a microwave when Andrew first started seeing him. Angie didn’t imagine that Lucas would have left if it meant making an adult out of himself.

She stroked Andrew’s hair and he accepted the touch, leaning his head on her shoulder. His skin felt like a warming pot against hers, his hair as fine as a baby’s. She suspected that she would have to ask him a lot in the upcoming months if he was getting enough sunlight. He had this tendency to withdraw and keep himself low charge whenever he felt down.

“You can cry if you want to,” she said.

“Thanks, but I’ve done that enough. I’m just tired now,” he said. He did seem it; he leaned into her with more weight than usual. “I think he’ll be back. I just have to wait.”

“Uh,” Angie said, and was about to deter him when the oven’s timer went off. As Andrew scooted his chair out, someone knocked at his apartment door. “You get the muffins, I’ll get the person.”

Or, metaperson, as some people called them. The door opened to Shen Li-Min, Chanel sunglasses still set on her face and a sliver of flesh peeking out where her green crop top didn’t quite meet her high-waisted jeans. She had painted her talons a magnetic blue since Angie had last seen her and a down feather stuck on one of her breasts, indicating that she had just abandoned a set of wings. Like on most occasions, she looked marvelous.

“You look like shit,” Shen said.

“The newest top secret project’s got me on those late nights,” Angie said, which wasn’t untrue, but she still bristled at the possibility of Shen seeing right through those sunglasses and into her brain. In fact, the pause that came after that statement was significant, but Shen seemed to decide to leave it as she made her way into the apartment. Angie took the opportunity to pluck the downy feather off her boob. Shen shot her a sly grin and took off the ridiculous sunglasses. As soon as Angie saw her back, she frantically smoothed down her hair and top.

“Sorry, I was in Hong Kong and my phone wasn’t working right,” Shen said to Andrew, who still stood at the open oven, testing the muffin tops’ spring. “Are you okay?”

“He and Lucas broke up,” Angie said.

“Haha,” Shen said, waving her off. Then she must have caught Andrew’s face because she then said, “Wait, what? I didn’t know you were planning to do that.”

The stovetop grate emitted a horrible sound as it bent under the force of Andrew slamming the muffin tin on top of it. His jaw shuddered before he turned to walk out onto the balcony and Angie stared open-mouthed at the snapped tin and scattered muffins. A moment too late, she moved to follow him, but Shen corralled her away with stern eyes. Recognizing professional superhero mode, Angie backed off and Shen went to try to pry Andrew’s hands off the balcony guardrail before he bent it. She would have little luck, but still better than Angie-the-normal-human would.

Sometimes, she forgot how scary her friends could be.

She ate the rest of her too-dry pancake muffin for mostly her hangover’s sake and slipped her phone out of her pocket, heart pounding. Sometime between her trip here and now, the battery had died. She sighed in relief. Brent’s barrage of calls won’t reach her for hours, nor would his deluge of texts. 

When she told Andrew about Brent the first time, she pretended that she never loved him. It came easier that way. They had met the first week of their doctorate programs and started dating halfway through the academic year. She studied mechanical engineering, he studied transportation planning and engineering. Like her, he was brilliant and he could talk for hours about the nuances of traffic flow and how he would fix the country’s rotting infrastructure.

But he didn’t make it, dropping out of the program in their third year after a mental breakdown. When she realized that taking care of him and his depression would come between passing that semester’s classes, she chose passing. Maybe that made her selfish, but for her whole life people had chuckled at her desire to become a scientist and then couldn’t hide their shock when she went on to study science and engineering for real. She was one of only eight women in her biochemistry Master’s program and one of two in her doctorate’s program. She had worked too damn hard to stop there.

Brent now worked as a theater usher, trying to decide for the past few years whether or not he wanted to give school another shot. She didn’t know if he clung to the ideal relationship that he (but not she) remembered them having or if he wanted to use her to fulfill his dream as one of the world’s most genius scientists. Either way, she hated his constant questions, hated his desperation, and hated that her drunk side liked to go back in search of good sex.

Maybe she should set an alarm before every planned drunken outing, she mused. Alert: do not sleep with Brent tonight.

Yeah right, like she’d listen after 5 drinks.

“His name wasn’t really Lucas Trent.”

Angie’s head snapped up, her mind emptying of all subjects, even her pounding headache.

Over at the balcony, Andrew rubbed the heel of his palm across his eyes. His shoulders had gone taut and he trembled a little, either with sadness or with rage. 

Shen looked as shocked as Angie felt. “But how did—“ 

That’s when Andrew exploded. “The bastard slept next to me in my bed! The first thing I saw every morning was his face, the first thing I did every day was make him breakfast—All this time, I thought he was my soulmate. And then this morning, he says to me, ‘I’m not a person.’”

“What does that even mean?” Shen asked.

Andrew threw his hands up in the air. “Something about not knowing who he was without me. And now he has to go learn who he is.”

Angie rolled her eyes. She had actually heard that one before, from the second douchebag she dated in college. Classics major. 18-year-old her thought he was a real deep guy until she caught him making out with another girl at a party and he gave her a whole shpiel about how she needed to set him free so they could both discover who they truly were and blah, blah, blah. To some extent, he may have been correct: her true self did not want to see him ever again after that.

“Andrew,” she called, scuffing her shoes against the tiled floor as she reached him, “he’s an asshole.”

He gave her such a pathetic look, like the one her younger nephews put on when they learned that something they wanted was desperately out of reach. “I know.”

She gripped his shoulders and leaned her forehead up against his. She said in her sternest professor voice, “We are going to go out and drink mimosas, and you are going to forget all about him.”

“Oh please, let’s,” Shen said. “I’m on evening time right now, but could still kill somebody for brunch.”

“So much for all these muffins I made,” he said, but managed a strong enough smile for the two of them. “Okay, as long as we go somewhere with breakfast pizza.”

He went to change out of his grieving pajamas and into something less miserable to witness. Meanwhile, Shen helped Angie neaten her clothes to the point where maybe someone wouldn’t guess instantly that she was in a prolonged Walk of Shame. When they finally left, they did so with the mess remaining around the stove, its reparation put off for an unspecified later. Angie also left her cellphone on Andrew’s table. It laid there dead, blocking the unwanted ringing, preventing an invasion into her life that involved sobs for weapons, skillful at cutting open old wounds.


End file.
